Europe|Auschwitz Survivors, in Their 90s, Urge Germany to Act on War Crimes Case

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Auschwitz Survivors, in Their 90s, Urge Germany to Act on War Crimes Case

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Oskar Gröning, a former German SS officer, was sentenced last year to four years in prison for accessory to murder, but the decision has been appealed.CreditCreditRonny Hartmann/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

BERLIN — Nonagenarian survivors of Auschwitz, including two who recently met Pope Francis when he visited the former Nazi death camp, have asked Germany’s highest court to swiftly resolve the case of a former SS soldier who was convicted of complicity in the murder of 300,000 prisoners.

The German authorities have adopted a more aggressive approach to prosecuting those suspected of being Nazis, but “Auschwitz survivors do not have as much time as German justice,” said Roman Kent, 90, the New York-based president of the International Auschwitz Committee, a nongovernmental group that unites Holocaust survivors.

The former SS soldier, Oskar Gröning, now 95, was sentenced in July 2015 by a court in Lüneburg to four years in prison for accessory to murder while serving at Auschwitz, where he also confiscated money and jewels from arriving prisoners.

His lawyers and those representing some of the dozens of co-plaintiffs in the case appealed the decision, but the time needed to address legal technicalities delayed the arrival of the case at Germany’s Federal Court of Justice, the highest court for civil and criminal cases.

The appeal was formally received on March 22, said Erna Besirovic, a justice official at the court, in Karlsruhe.

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Roman Kent, Holocaust survivor and president of the International Auschwitz Committee, last year.CreditOdd Andersen/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

“The case is pending,” she said, with no date set for a hearing or other action.

Mr. Kent and a Hungarian co-plaintiff were among a group of 80 Holocaust survivors who met the pope on his recent visit to Auschwitz, said Christoph Heubner, the vice president of the International Auschwitz Committee, who is based in Berlin.

He and Mr. Kent said that nonagenarian survivors had taken some comfort from belated justice in the cases of Mr. Gröning and another former SS guard, Reinhold Hanning, who was sentenced in June in the town of Detmold, southwest of Hamburg, to five years as an accessory to 170,000 cases of murder.

The two men were among a few dozen whom Germany’s central office for prosecuting Nazi crimes identified as fit and able to stand trial despite their advanced age.

For decades, former guards at Auschwitz and other death camps escaped prosecution because the German justice authorities said they could prosecute only individuals who had been concretely tied by witnesses or other evidence to specific criminal acts.

The German approach changed after the trial of John Demjanjuk, a former guard at the Sobibor camp who lived and worked in the United States for many years and who was eventually sentenced to five years by a Munich court in 2011.

Mr. Heubner, who has worked at the International Auschwitz Committee for 20 years, said in a telephone interview that the survivors who had placed renewed hope in German justice after the trials of Mr. Gröning and Mr. Hanning were losing faith once more.

These co-plaintiffs had “a great new impression of Germany,” Mr. Heubner said. Now, “it is like being plunged into a bath of cold water; suddenly, again, nothing is happening.”

Survivors “are harshly critical of German justice, whose almost complete inaction regarding the judgment of SS perpetrators they had to follow for decades,” Mr. Heubner added in a statement.

The central office for prosecuting Nazi crimes in Ludwigsburg continues to pursue cases, announcing only last week that it would seek the prosecution of four former male guards and four women who worked in administration at the Stutthof camp, near Gdansk, Poland.

But also last week, the justice authorities confirmed a finding that a 92-year-old woman in north Germany who had served as a radio operator in Auschwitz was not fit to stand trial on charges of complicity in the murder of 260,000 prisoners.

In April, a former SS guard at Auschwitz who was scheduled to go on trial in Hanau, near Frankfurt, died days before his case was to open.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A8 of the New York edition with the headline: Survivors of Auschwitz Seek Action in Nazi Case. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe